A few days ago, I wrote an article "Make Your Business Grow with Managed Services" on LinkedIn where I spoke about the benefits of leveraging Managed Services for your business. I briefly touched upon a few industry pain areas and the ROI you get on your investments on managed services. Today, I would like to share a few criteria on how you can select the right managed services provider (MSP) for your organization. For those, who are new to this terminology, Managed Services Provider (or MSP) is an IT firm who acts as a facilitator of IT services for your organization run smoothly and efficiently at all the times while lowering your operational cost.

Leveraging managed services from an IT services vendor makes sense for companies of all sizes, ranging from SME to Large Enterprises. It gives companies predictable SLA’s with high automation and costs to their business. Typically, it reduces operating costs by at least 15%. The technology obsolesce risk and investment is also transferred. Most of the SMBs don’t have IT budget and adequate resources available, and hence they prefer outsourcing their IT tasks to a specialized managed services providers who can act as a partner to their business. Now, when you know the importance of hiring an MSP for your organization, let’s look at the different parameters that need to be considered while evaluating them.

1. 247365 Remote Monitoring Services: First and foremost, the MSP provider under evaluation must be capable of providing 24*7 support through the year. They should be having a state-of-art NOC center equipped with latest data center, applications and other IT assets monitoring tools which can prevent your infrastructure from being shut down due to any problems. The tools should be capable of proactively triggering an alert to the service desk to be proactive and reduce downtimes. If the MSP is not having such advanced tools, it’s worth looking at other vendors.

2. Flexibility and scalability to adapt to changing business conditions: Every business operating today is bound to change according to market conditions in future. Hence, this calls for a check on MSP’s flexibility and scalability capabilities. How quickly can they support your growing needs of business? Do they have enough resources/skill-sets to support your growing business? If the vendor is very small, they won’t have enough resources to support you in future or if the vendor is a big firm, they may not be flexible enough to address your needs, especially when you are a small or medium size organization. A MSP vendor of just the right size will allow you to better align your IT operating requirements and still be flexible to your business needs.

3. Continuous Improvement & Domain Expertise: A Managed Services Provider is not just your vendor but your IT partner who will play a critical role in making your business a success. The managed services vendor should have a defined model to how they will deliver value to your business in terms of transformation. They should have ITIL, ISO 20000 and ISO 27001 consultants that work on your process improvement. Also, if your MSP has a good knowledge about your industry, they would help you improve your IT operations and beyond through experience.

4. Cost: For most of the organizations, economies of scale help managed services providers meet a lower cost. Needless to say, if the MSP charges you a bomb towards its services, the whole purpose of outsourcing gets defeated. Hence it becomes crucial to consider this as one of the evaluation criteria while assessing the MSPs.

5. Performance-Based Service Level Agreements (SLAs): A significant benefit offered by managed services includes the guarantee of performance that lies with MSP. The MSP is free to innovate, implement new tools and softwares for better results and apparently, both get benefitted. On the contrary, if the MSP is unable to deliver the desired results as per the SLAs, they should be willing to pay the financial penalties for the business losses caused to the customer.

6. MSP’s Reputation and Financial Stability: I’m sure I don’t need to explain this in detail. The reputation and financial stability is critical in long run. Most of the organizations evaluate their MSPs based on the number of years they are existing in the market. Though it’s a valid parameter, you may also want to club it with their track record and do some referral checks with the existing customers. MSPs who clear this test can support your business within the borders of predictable IT spend.

Summary

A lot of organizations are inclining towards Managed Services and the reason is obvious – "to save cost". However, cost reduction without transformation is not a long term partnership. With the aforementioned parameters, you can evaluate your existing managed services provider and decide if they meet all these criteria. If you are out on a hunt for a new MSP, try considering Intertec Systems as one of your possible vendors. Intertec has been in the IT business for 25 years and has got strong customer references across Middle East & North Africa and India. It has made a recent entry in the UK and US markets. Its managed service customers include Government, Retail, Real Estate, Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals across 18 countries.